 The ability to detect and understand the actions of animate others is critical for survival. Cave men that didn't understand animacy were likely eaten by other mammals that did. The overarching question for this line of research is how do our brains tell a Who from a What?
Recently, two competing hypotheses have emerged as to how our brains accomplish this feat: the mirror neuron system and the social network. Mirror neurons become active both when a person performs an action and when a person observes that action being performed by another. Neurons within the social network become active in social contexts, such as during the assessment of emotion in others, or while imagining another's state of mind.
Lateral and medial views of the Social Network and Mirror System
The social network (yellow) includes areas associated with biological motion (1, superior temporal sulcus), biological form (6, lateral fusiform gyrus), mentalizing (3, medial prefrontal cortex; 4, posterior cingulate) and affective processing (2, insula; 5, amygdala). The mirror system (blue) consists of (7) inferior parietal cortex and (8) ventral premotor/inferior frontal cortex.
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We examined the differential activation of these networks under conditions in which a cartoon figure and its movements remained constant, but the backgrounds were changed to bias an interpretation of animacy (e.g., ice-skater) or inanimacy (e.g., spinning top).
We found that only the social network is specifically more active when people interpret the figure as animate (Wheatley, Milleville, & Martin, 2006).
THE UNCANNY VALLEY
Now that we know what system is active when we interpret animacy, we are investigating the gray areas. When do objects take on human qualities? When do people appear less than human? And, how do we feel when confronted with examples such as these that jump their natural categories?
We are investigating these questions in a project entitled the Uncanny Valley after the hypothesis that inanimate objects become repulsive if they start to look eerily too human
(Mori, 1970).
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
 Wheatley, T., Milleville, S. C., & Martin, A. (2007). Understanding animate agents: Distinct roles for the social network and mirror system. Psychological Science, 18, 469-474. Discussed by G. Chin,"Editor's Choice", Science, 316, 1255, 2007].
Wheatley, T., Weisberg, J., Beauchamp, M. S. & Martin, A. (2005) Automatic priming of semantically related words reduces activity in the fusiform gyrus. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1871-1885.
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